Tangier

Description

A LETTER FROM THE PAST FORCES A DISGRACED BUREAUCRAT TO CONFRONT HIS FUTURE

Tangier tells two parallel stories, one a mystery, the other a spy story, set fifty years apart and told in a series of alternating sections. In the first, we follow Christopher Chaffee, a disgraced Washington power-broker whose father, a French diplomat, died in a Vichy prison in 1944—or so he had always believed until a letter, received decades after it was posted, upends his life. Soon, he is searching the narrow lanes and twisted souls of Tangier’s ancient Medina in search of the father he has never known. At the same time he is reluctantly inspecting the corkscrew of his own life; a search for a parent is always a search for self.

The other story is a tale of wartime espionage and betrayal, set in Morocco during WWII. In it we follow Christopher’s father, Rene Laurent, as he fights to maintain his soul—and his life—in the snake pit of wartime Tangier. The stories slowly intertwine as Christopher unwraps the mystery of his father’s fate, and Laurent gets caught up in the intrigues of opposing espionage webs—and caught up, too, in the arms of a woman he knows he shouldn’t trust.

Ultimately, Tangier is the story of fathers and sons, the alienation of being a stranger in a strange land, the seductive face of betrayal and, finally, the lengths we’ll go to for redemption.